Lena Dunham ‘Raped by a Republican’ Story in Bestseller Collapses Under Scrutiny

The timing of this is not good, when paired with the UVa story, but did Lena Dunham make up a rape story?

In her just-released memoir, Not That Kind of Girl, Lena Dunham describes her alma mater, Oberlin College, as "a liberal arts haven in the cornfields of Ohio." After a month-long investigation that included more than a dozen interviews, a trip to the Oberlin campus, and hours spent poring through the Oberlin College archives, her description of the campus remains the only detail Breitbart News was able to verify in Dunham's story of being raped by a campus Republican named Barry.

On top of the name Barry, which Dunham does not identify as a pseudonym (more on the importance of this below), Dunham drops close to a dozen specific clues about the identity of the man she alleges raped her as a 19 year-old student. Some of the details are personality traits like his being a “poor loser” at poker. Other details are quite specific. For instance, Dunham informs us her rapist sported a flamboyant mustache, worked at the campus library, and even names the radio talk show he hosted.

To be sure we get the point, on three occasions Dunham tells her readers that her attacker is a Republican or a conservative, and a prominent one at that -- no less than the "campus's resident conservative."

For weeks, and to no avail, using phone and email and online searches, Breitbart News was able to verify just one of these details. Like everyone else interested, we immediately found that there indeed was a prominent Republican named Barry who attended Oberlin at the time in question.

Whatever her motives, Dunham is pointing her powerful finger at this man. But as you will read in the details below, the facts do not point back at him. Not even close. This man is by all accounts (including his own) innocent.

Here's a perfect example of why a lot of people -- specifically, but not exclusively, men -- have a difficult time understanding rape in the terms that activists define it.

To quote the BreitBart piece on Dunham's account of her alleged rape:

After ignoring a warning from a friend, Dunham tells us she still took Barry back to her place and then explicitly details a dark sexual encounter. Twice during intercourse she discovers that he has removed his condom without telling her. The second time she throws Barry out and the next morning she "diligently enter the encounter into the Word document … titled 'Intimacy Database.' Barry. Number four. We fucked. 69'd. It was terribly aggressive. Only once. No one came."

Dunham writes: “But I also know that at no moment did I consent to being handled that way. I never gave him permission to be rough, to stick himself inside me without a barrier between us. I never gave him permission.

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If I am reading that right, Dunham's contention is that the act in question began as consensual sex, and that it turned into rape when Barry took the condom off and became more aggressive than Dunham would have liked. To most rational minds, that would seem like a valid line of reasoning if Barry continued to force himself on her after she objected. But Barry puts the condom backs on after she objects. He takes it off, she objects again, and Barry is kicked out. The next day, Dunham records the act as consensual sex in her weird little "Intimacy Database." It is only after a period of reflection that she decides she has been raped.

It is this line of reasoning that people struggle to follow. Essentially, "If I decide I was raped, then I was raped." These college rape cases fascinate me, so I've read through many of them, and a significant number of them involve a situation like Dunham describes. The girl who is carrying her mattress around Columbia is one of them.

Here's a hypothetical scenario:

Person A invites Person B into their home for dinner. During dinner, Person B excuses himself to visit the bathroom. Person A consents to Person B using the bathroom. But instead of using the bathroom, Person B starts wanders into Person A's bedroom and starts snooping around. Person A tells Person B that he does not have permission to be in the bedroom. Person B leaves the bedroom. Later in the evening, Person B again returns to the bedroom. Person A kicks Person B out of the house.

Was Person B guilty of criminal trespass?

It goes without saying that rape is a more serious crime than trespass. But the fundamental legal question in both situations is the same.

If you reduce Dunham's logic far enough, you reach a point where one party in a sexual encounter is guilty of rape if that party does not receive explicit permission for each thrust. Seriously. Think about it. Dunham's accusation is not far away from that. She writes, "At no moment did I consent to being handled that way." So now the question is, when she consented to sex, what did she consent to? If, during the act, he rolls her over on top of him and smacks her ass, and she did not envision that when consenting to sex, has he just raped her?

Look, Barry as described by Dunham is a scumbag. But the law cannot possibly cover every potential event once sex is initiated. It is like a business arrangement: once sex is consensual, two people become partners. If one partner bankrupts a business with the decisions that he makes, he might be a bad businessman who ruins the other partner's life, but is he a criminal? Is it victim blaming to say that the partner's life who is ruined should have chosen his or her business partner more carefully?

I don't know the answers to all these questions, but I know that they need to be discussed, and that such a discussion is extremely difficult to hold in the current climate.

You're too smart for that comment, SS. What you can get out of the reporting is Dunham likely used a pseudonym for the man in question while not stating so and in doing that implicated a person who has some, but not all, of the same characteristics or she is intentionally trying to implicate the named person (who as the article shows, is identifiable with cursory research or by those in the community at the time) even though she is misstating some identifying details for some reason.

As far as daemon's separate point, as a female, I tend to agree with him. I'm very uncomfortable with the idea that something could "retroactively" be considered rape.

If you start having consensual sex with a condom, then you take the condom off without the woman's consent and resume having sex with her, well, it may not technically be "rape," but it's something he shouldn't do and it should be grounds for the woman to rescind her consent.

If you start having consensual sex with a condom, then you take the condom off without the woman's consent and resume having sex with her, well, it may not technically be "rape," but it's something he shouldn't do and it should be grounds for the woman to rescind her consent.

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And it sounds like Dunham rescinded that consent, throwing him out of her room. And if it isn't "technically" rape, then why are we using the word? And how does it feel to somebody who was "technically" raped, who did "technically" say "no you may not put your penis inside my vagina," or who was "technically" incapacitated and taken advantage of?